Douglas Coupland Quotes

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

I think you get to a certain point in your life and where you grew up stops reminding you of when you grew up. Everything changes, everything metamorphosizes.

I'm relating to a period that doesn't exist anymore.

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn't feel like it's about me. Time created a distance.

It's pretty strange because you have images of people in your head when you left, then you just think they're going to be the same when you come back, like time freezes. I have sisters and from the ages of 11 to 13 - it's a big change for girls.

I feel like I didn't know who I was when I was 15. I don't feel like you're who you are for life, not even when you're 20.

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

The world changed. Hollywood changed. I think we've lost something, and we don't know how to get it back.

It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.

I'm not a diva. I'm a tadpole trying to be a frog.

I guess I was popular in high school.

I look at old photos of me, and I don't feel connected to them at all.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated

I used to be.

I'm very happy with my life and career, but I do find myself having serious attacks of nostalgia, and I don't quite know why. Even though I've got to travel the world and do amazing things, I still want to go back to my teenage years and change little aspects of it. It's strange, but it does continue to bug me.

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.

My New York, the one I identify with as a kid, has greatly changed. And I'm sure the people who were adults when I was a kid probably felt the same way.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

memory is the only way home.